Electrical and electronic equipment is oftentimes constructed of circuit card assemblies mounting components and which are installed in and interconnected by plug-in circuit card assembly mounting apparatus to form the equipment. Typically, the plug-in circuit card assembly mounting apparatus is constructed with rows of shelves wherein each shelf is open at the front and arranged to receive a number of plug-in circuit card assemblies. The back of each shelf may have a printed wiring backplane structure arranged to receive each plug-in circuit card assembly and interconnect the installed circuit card assemblies to form the electrical and electronic equipment.
Components mounted on a circuit card assembly generate heat which must be dissipated to insure proper operation of the circuit card assembly and other circuit card assemblies installed in the mounting apparatus. In low power equipment applications, the shelves may be sufficiently spaced apart to allow the component generated heat to dissipate in the space among the shelves. Higher power equipment requires that cooling fans be installed in the circuit card assembly mounting apparatus to dissipate the component generated heat. In yet higher power equipment, cooling water is required to circulate throughout the mounting apparatus to cool installed circuit card assemblies.
The technological advance of equipment design results in components that have a multitude of electrical circuits that are reduced in size to fit into a component and which electrical circuits operate at a sufficient high power to generate a large amount of heat.
A problem arises in that new types of components, in addition to generating more heat, are smaller in size thereby allowing more components to be mounted on a circuit card assembly and thereby cause more heat to be generated by the circuit card assembly. Accordingly, a need exists for a circuit card assembly having a structure arranged to transfer heat generated by components mounted on the circuit card assembly to a common heat sink arranged to dissipate the component generated heat.